The New Old World (82 page)

This is not remote history, best left to antiquarians. The implacable refusal of the Turkish state to acknowledge the extermination of the Armenians on its territory is not anachronistic or irrational, but a contemporary defence of its own legitimacy. For the first great ethnic cleansing, which made Anatolia homogeneously Muslim, if not yet Turkish, was followed by lesser purges of the body politic, in the name of the same integral nationalism, that have continued to this day: pogroms of Greeks, 1955/1964; annexation, and expulsion of Cypriots, 1974; killing of Alevis, 1978/1993; repression of Kurds, 1925–2008. A truthful accounting has been made of none of these, and cannot be without painful cost to the inherited identity and continuity of the Turkish Republic. That is why leaders of the AKP relentlessly pursue the same negationism as their predecessors, with the same threats and yet more dollars. For all the tensions between them as traditions, Kemalism and Islamism have never been chemically separate. Erdo
ğ
an and Gül, too, are at home in the official synthesis between them, the ‘Turkish nation' which, in what passes for a reform in Brussels, they have made it a crime to insult.

How, then, does Turkish membership of the Union now stand? The conventional reasons for which it is pressed within the EU are legion: militarily, a bulwark against terrorism; economically, dynamic entrepreneurs and cheap labour; politically, a model for regional neighbours; diplomatically, a bridge between civilizations; ideologically, the coming of a true multi-culturalism in Europe. In the past, what might have been set against these considerations would have been fears that such an elongation of the Union, into such remote terrain, must undermine its institutional cohesion, as a widening one step too far, compromising any chance of federal deepening. But that horse has already bolted. To reject Turkish
membership on that basis would be shutting the door long after there was any point in it. The Union is becoming a vast free range for the factors of production, far from an agora of any collective will, and the addition of one more grazing ground, however large or still relatively untended, will not alter its nature.

In Turkey itself, as in Europe, the major forces working for its entry into the Union are the contemporary incarnations of the party of order: the bourse, the mosque, the barracks and the media. The consensus that stretches across businessmen and officers, preachers and politicians, lights of the press and of television, is not quite a unanimity. Here and there, surly voices of reaction can be heard. But the extent of concord is striking. What, if the term has any application, of the party of movement? It offers the one good reason, among so many crass or spurious ones, for welcoming Turkey into the Union. For the Turkish Left, politically marginal but culturally central, the EU represents hope of some release from the cults and repressions of Kemal and the Koran; for the Turkish poor, of chances of employment and elements of welfare; for Kurds and Alevis, of some rights for minorities. How far these hopes are all realistic is another matter. But they are not thereby to be denied. There is another side to the matter too. For it is here, and perhaps here alone, that notions that Europe would gain morally from the admission of Turkey to the EU cease to be multi-cultural cant. The fabric of the Union would indeed be richer for the arrival of so many vigorous, critical minds, and the manifest dignity and civility, that must strike the most casual visitor, of so many of the ordinary people of the country

It would be better if the EU lived up to some of the principles on which it congratulates itself, and were to greet the entry of a Turkey that had evacuated Cyprus, and made restitution for its occupation of it; that had granted rights to the Kurds comparable to those of the Welsh or Catalans; that had acknowledged the genocide of the Armenians. Its record makes clear how remote is any such prospect. The probability is something else: a Union stretching to Mount Ararat, in which ministers, deputies and tourists—or ministers and deputies as tourists: the Fischers, Kouchners, Cohn-Bendits enjoying their retirement—circulate comfortably by TGV between Paris or Berlin and Istanbul, blue flags with golden stars at every stop on the way, from the monument to the extermination of the Jews by the Brandenburg Gate to the monument to the exterminators of the Armenians on Liberty Hill. Former commissioner Rehn could enjoy a game of football in the adjoining park, a few metres from the
marble memorials to Talat and Enver, while bored young soldiers—fewer of them, naturally—lounge peacefully in Kyrenia, and terrorists continue to meet their deserts in Dersim. Turkish dreams of a better life in Europe are to be respected. But emancipation rarely just arrives from abroad.

 

1
.
The Discovery of Islands,
p. 278.

2
. See Bruce Masters,
Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World
, Cambridge 2001, pp. 16–40: ‘The social status of a Muslim was higher than that of a non-Muslim in much the same way that the codification of tradition as law established the social and legal superiority of men over women': p. 23.

3
.
Osman's Dream
:
The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300–1923
, New York 2005, p. 322. Although Mecca and Medina formed part of the Empire from the early sixteenth century onwards, no Ottoman sultan ever paid a pilgrimage to the Holy Places.

4
. The combination of ideological war against Christians and practical use of them went back to the earliest period of Osmanlı history, before the Straits were crossed or the
devshirme
developed: for an illuminating study of this pattern, see Cemal Kafadar,
Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State
, Berkeley 1995,
passim
.

5
. The last
devshirme
was in 1703. For the way in which it declined, and was succeeded as a catchment for the elite by a ‘vizier-pasha' stratum, see Donald Quataert,
The Ottoman Empire 1700–1922
, Cambridge 2000, pp. 33–4, 43, 99–100.

6
. An arrangement that suited all parties: ‘The army feared that an intake of Christian peasants would be a burden to it and that non-Muslims would damage morale. This was a serious point, because, as all observers of the Ottoman army between 1850 and 1918 agree, the fighting spirit of the Ottoman troops was to a very high degree religious. Attacks were always carried out under simultaneous shouting of “Allah, Allah” and “Allahüekber” (God is great). It would be hard to envisage a religiously mixed army to do the same. Most Muslims, especially in the countryside, disliked the idea of Christians bearing arms (one observer compares their feelings to those in the southern United States on the equality of blacks). Most Ottoman Christians were equally unenthusiastic. By and large they felt themselves to be subjects of the Ottoman state, not members of an Ottoman nation. The idea of Ottoman nation-building (known at the time as the idea of the “Unity of the Elements”) always was limited to a small, mostly Muslim, elite. The Ottoman government, finally, had the strongest incentive of all not actually to conscript Christians. The emphasis on equality before the law in the 1856 edict also meant that the
cizye
tax which Christians and Jews traditionally paid as a tribute to the Islamic state in which they lived, had to go. Although the number of Ottoman Christians went down considerably during the last century of the Empire due to the loss of European provinces, they still represented nearly 30 per cent of the population in Abdülhamit's reign and close to 20 per cent on the eve of World War I. Not surprisingly, the
cizye
was the second most important source of tax revenue (after the tithe) of the state. No wonder, then, that the state actually preferred that the Christians should pay an exemption tax of their own, rather than serve. This indeed remained universal practice until 1909': Erik-Jan Zürcher, ‘The Ottoman Conscription System, 1844–1914',
International Review of Social History
, Vol. 43, No. 3, 1998, p. 446.

7
. Finkel cites the statesman Ahmed Cevdet Pasha's report of the widespread reaction when the Reform Edict of 1856 was proclaimed: ‘Today we have lost the sacred, communal rights which our ancestors won with their blood. The Muslim community is the ruling community, but it has been deprived of its sacred rights. This is a day of grief and sorrow for the Muslim people':
Osman's Dream
, p. 459.

8
. ‘By late 1909, the number of CUP branches across the Empire had multiplied from 83 (some of them minor cells) to 360, while membership had grown roughly from 2,250 to 850,000': M. S¸ükrü Haniog˘lu,
A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire
, Princeton 2008, p. 160—now much the best treatment of the period.

9
. For this duality, see Hugh Poulton,
Top Hat, Grey Wolf and Crescent: Turkish Nationalism and the Turkish Republic
, New York 1997, p. 80. As early as 1910, Talat had told the Central Committee of the CUP in a secret speech: ‘You are aware that by the terms of the Constitution, equality of Muslims and infidels was affirmed by you. One and all know and feel this is an unrealizable ideal. The Shariat, our whole past history and the sentiments of hundreds of thousands of Muslims and even the sentiments of the infidels themselves, who stubbornly resist every effort to Ottomanize them, present an impenetrable barrier to the establishment of real equality . . . There can therefore be no question of real equality until we have succeeded in Ottomanizing the Empire'.

10
. For the intellectual influences on them, see Zürcher, ‘Ottoman Sources of Kemalist Thought', which points to French sources—Laffitte, Le Bon, Durkheim—and Hanio
ğ
lu, ‘Blueprints for a Future Society', which emphasizes German vulgar materialism—Ludwig Büchner, Haeckel—and social Darwinism: both in Elisabeth Özdalga (ed.),
Late Ottoman Society: The Intellectual Legacy
, London 1995, pp. 14–27 and 29–93.

11
. Taner Akçam,
A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility
, New York 2006, p. 115, which cites a speech by Enver in which he declared: ‘How could a person forget the plains, the meadows, watered with the blood of our forefathers; abandon those places where Turkish raiders had hidden their steeds for a full four hundred years, with our mosques, our tombs, our dervish retreats, our bridges and our castles, to leave them to our slaves, to be driven out of Rumelia into Anatolia; this was beyond a person's endurance. I am prepared to gladly sacrifice the remaining years of my life to take revenge on the Bulgarians, the Greeks and the Montenegrins'.

12
. For the diplomatic drama, see Hanio
ğ
lu,
The Late Ottoman Empire
, p. 175; Ulrich Trumpener,
Germany and the Ottoman Empire 1914–1918
, Princeton 1968, pp. 12–20; and David Fromkin,
A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East 1914–1922
, London 1989, pp. 54–76, which argues that Enver tricked the Germans into the alliance, who then tricked him over the way hostilities against Russia were eventually staged.

13
. The best portrait of Enver in these years remains Charles Haley, ‘The Desperate Ottoman: Enver Pasa and the German Empire',
Middle Eastern Studies
, No. 1, January 1994, pp. 1–51, and No. 2, April 1994, pp. 224–51.

14
. For different estimates, see Akçam,
A Shameful Act
, p. 42.

15
. For the origins of the Special Organization, see Philip Stoddard,
The Ottoman Government and the Arabs, 1911 to 1918: A Preliminary Study of the Teskilât-ı Mahsusa
, Princeton dissertation, 1963, pp. 46–62.

16
. For these waves of ethnic cleansing, see Benjamin Lieberman's balanced and sobering
Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe
, Chicago 2006, pp. 3–52.

17
. Lieberman,
Terrible Fate
, pp. 87–91, who comments that in this case, paradoxically, perhaps two-fifths of those deported ended up in Russian cities—though not St Petersburg or Moscow—from which they had hitherto been banned.

18
. The
Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing
, Cambridge 2005, p. 152.

19
.
The Dark Side of Democracy
, p. 140. In January 2009, a document in Talat's papers, passed by his widow to the journalist Murat Bardakçi, an apologist for her husband, recorded a drop in the Armenian population of the Empire from 1, 256,000 in 1914 to 284,157 in 1916. See ‘Nearly a Million Genocide Victims, Covered in a Cloak of Amnesia',
New York Times
, 9 March 2009.

20
. See Eric Zürcher,
Turkey: A Modern History
, London 2004, p. 135; Nur Belge Criss,
Istanbul under Allied Occupation 1919–1923
, Leiden 1999, p. 4. Eric Zürcher,
The Unionist Factor
, Leiden 1984, p. 84.

21
. The fullest account is in Zürcher,
The Unionist Factor
, pp. 68–105.

22
. For a graphic description by the naval officer in command, Lieutenant-Captain Hermann Baltzer, see
Orientrundschau,
November 1933, pp. 121–3; corroboration in the diary of of Vice-Admiral Albert Hopman, in Winfried Baumgart (ed.),
Von Brest-Litovsk zur Deutschen Novemberrevolution
, Göttingen 1971, p. 634.

23
. They were accompanied by Bedri, police chief in Istanbul, Cemal Azmi, governor of Trebizond, and Rusuhi, another medical doctor.

24
. For a description of the conflagration, see Andrew Mango,
Atatürk
, London 1999, pp. 345–7.

25
. ‘If Nansen's support for a compulsory exchange of minorities across the Aegean posed any moral problems, the Nobel Prize committee were untroubled by them. Nor were any qualms expressed by the western powers who had given Nansen a mandate and encouraged him to use it creatively': Bruce Clark,
Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion forged Modern Greece and Turkey
, London 2006, p. 95, who notes ‘the delight in the Turkish camp when Nansen grasped the nettle first'.